She might well wonder what took them so long. Doris Lessing is the ideal winner of the Nobel Prize. After all, the prize is about idealism, and was founded in the belief that writers can make the world a better place. Lessing can depict the world as a terrible place, peopled by terrorists, in which the women can be as violent as the men, and war can describe the planet entirely. But she never abandons the hope that the planet can be better, even if she has to imagine other planets to show how this is possible.

I have found it to be true that the older I've become the better my life has become.

Doris Lessing was nothing less than the goddess of literature herself for young women like myself aspiring to write in the 1970s. Her classic, The Golden Noteb…

What is a hero without love for mankind?

Noble characters and pure affections and happy scenes are very comforting things. They're a refuge from life's disillusionments.

The writer is delegated to declare and to celebrate man's proven capacity for greatness of heart and spirit - for gallantry in defeat - for courage, compassion…

There is a misconception of tragedy with which I have been struck in review after review, and in many conversations with writers and readers alike. It is the i…